One of the single most notorious video games of all time first released 35 years ago this year – E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, developed for the Atari 2600 home video game console. The game arrived in December 1982 and has since gone on to become one of the more notable cautionary tales in the video game industry.
The game had players controlling the titular alien as he explored the map, seeking out pieces of an interplanetary telephone. E.T. must find three pieces, which can be found scattered randomly throughout pits (or wells) on the map. However, he only has a certain amount of energy with which to wander the map – though he can restore his energy by eating Reese’s Pieces. If he collects nine Reese’s Pieces, E.T. can call Elliott, who will bring him a telephone piece automatically. After assembling the phone, the player has to go to a specific area of the map where E.T.’s spaceship can be called, and then meet the ship before time expires. The player must also avoid enemies, such as scientists (who want to take E.T. away for experiments) and FBI agents (who will steal a piece of the telephone).
The film that the game was based on saw massive success upon its release in June 1982, and Atari therefore immediately started negotiations with Universal Pictures to secure the rights for a video game adaptation. The company got the green light, and tasked developer Howard Scott Warshaw (who previously saw significant success with the Atari adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark and his original project Yars’ Revenge) with making the game.
Unfortunately for Atari and especially for Warshaw, there was less than six weeks available for development before the company would have to go to press in order to make sure the game was in stores for the holiday season. The strict timeline meant that there was no audience testing before E.T. hit store shelves, though Atari also believed that their existing stability and Warshaw’s previous success warranted skipping that quality test.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was critically panned upon its release and is considered one of the worst video games of all time. Though it did sell about 1.5 million copies and became one of the bestselling titles for the console, Atari’s critical misstep was producing an additional 3 million or so copies on top of that which went unsold. The huge amount of unsold games on top of how badly the game itself was received are both often cited as factors that played into the industry crash of 1983.
Infamously, a huge number of the games were buried in a landfill in Almaogordo, New Mexico, in September 1983 (along with various other Atari hardware and software). The Atari video game burial was long thought to be just an urban legend, but in 2014, the games were dug up and the dig itself became the subject of a documentary, Atari: Game Over. Several cartridges went on to the auction block (with a copy of E.T. selling for more than $1,500) while others went on to be taken in by the Smithsonian Institution.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial continues to stand as a monument to a number of things – to greed, to hubris, to over-ambitious decision making, to the 1980s video game scene, to hasty game development, and to failure. It remains a benchmark for game development, and despite its notorious reputation, gamers are still talking about it 35 years later.
